Ecstasy, Marjiuana and Cloud Computing
What unites the two drugs with cloud computing. Well, it’s simple.
A recent news Ansa informs us that a version of ecstasy would be used to treat blood cancers, moreover Ansa itself communicates that the DNA sequence of marijuana has been completed and has been made public.
There has already been a lot of talk about a therapeutic use of soft drugs such as cannabis, now researchers at the University of Birmingham, in Great Britain hypothesize the use of the synthetic drug Ecstasy to treat blood cancers.
It is well known that universities often use large computational infrastructures to simulate biological processes or sequence DNA, in the past these complex networks called Grids, were dedicated and designed for those purposes, impacting the final cost of research. A public Cloud Computing infrastructure can, thanks to its versatility and elasticity, serve countless purposes at the same time, including support for medical biological research.
Today’s news of the completion of the DNA sequence of marijuana was made public on Amazon EC2, the Dutch company Medicinal Genomics announced. The famous “weed” is revealing many of its secrets thanks to the sequencing of its DNA. The first rough map of the genome of marijuana, Hemp sativa, is available free of charge to the international scientific community (and beyond); in the next few days the publication of a related species, the Indica Hemp, will follow.
The Dutch company Medicinal Genomics, which carried out the sequencing work in its laboratories in Amsterdam, states in the journal Nature, that the raw DNA sequence of marijuana (whose genome is estimated to have a length of 400 million bases) has been posted on Amazon EC2. The company’s promise, explains its founder Kevin McKernan, is to then publish the gene sequences, ordered one by one, (annotated in technical jargon) making them accessible through an iPad application by the fall. Cannabis is also looked at as a possible cure for many cancers because its toxicity is low, so the dose needed to be effective is not high enough to be dangerous. Cannabis is also promising as an analgesic as it seems to be associated with a lower risk of addiction than opioids and moreover seems to use alternative nerve channels to extinguish pain. The mapping of genes will allow us to learn more about the properties of individual compounds, both psychoactive and therapeutic compounds.
Amazon allows you to publish datasets for free that can be easily and quickly used by anyone and integrated into their Cloud-based applications. The publication of this data is free if useful and made available to the entire community. As we can see from the link, the categories of public data are:
- Astronomy
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Climate
- Economics
- Encyclopedic
- Geographic
- Mathematics
